To live well, a nation must produce well, which means the manufacturing industry is the most important manifestation of a country's comprehensive national strength.

After the Internet bubble and the economic crisis, countries around the world, especially developed countries, began to realize the importance of manufacturing again, and also re-examine their strengths and weaknesses in competitiveness.


The arrival of the fourth industrial revolution provides each country with the opportunity of development and transformation, but also faces the challenge of the change of competitiveness pattern. Intelligent manufacturing has become the new battlefield of competition among all countries. Countries have put forward strategies around manufacturing -- the US's National Manufacturing Innovation Network, Germany's Industry 4.0, Japan's Industrial Value Chain and, of course, China's Made in China 2025. So what are the differences between these strategies? And what is the root cause of these differences?



1 / The different ways of understanding, accumulation and inheritance of knowledge determine the manufacturing philosophy and culture

For the manufacturing industry, it is simply "the process of finding problems (such as quality defects, lack of precision, equipment failure, high cost, low efficiency, etc.), understanding problems, acquiring information in this process, abstracting it into knowledge, and using knowledge to understand, solve and avoid problems".

The means and methods of understanding and solving problems determine the form of acquired knowledge, while the process and form of abstracting knowledge and applying it determine the form of knowledge transmission. This process can be "done by people", "done by data" or "done by systems", which is the fundamental reason that determines the manufacturing philosophy of a country.

2 / Japan: "Continuous improvement through organizational culture and human training, very dependent on people in carrying knowledge"

Japan's unique culture of tolerance, obedience and collective concept has also deeply influenced the Japanese manufacturing culture, whose main feature is to solve the problems in the production system through the continuous optimization of the organization, cultural construction and human training. I believe that many domestic manufacturing enterprises can relate to this point, because the three aspects that are repeatedly emphasized in the process of receiving lean training are "company culture", "three-level organization" and "talent training". The most typical expression is the production management system with "whole production system maintenance (TPM)" as the core proposed by Japan in the 1970s. Its core idea can be summed up with "three wholes" : total efficiency, whole system and full participation. The realization means mainly include improvement in three aspects: improving work skills, improving team spirit and improving working environment, so that after the 1990s, Japan chose "Lean Manufacturing" as its transformation direction, rather than "6-Sigma Quality Management System".

Japanese enterprises also spare no effort in the cultivation of talents, especially the culture of "life-long employee system", which closely links employees with the fate of the enterprise, so that people's experience and knowledge can be accumulated, applied and passed down within the enterprise.

Japanese companies usually solve their problems by:

Problems → personnel quickly to the scene, confirm the present, explore the reality (three), and solve the problem → analysis of the cause of the problem, through improvement to avoid problems

The ultimate knowledge falls on people, and as people's skills improve, so does their ability to solve and avoid problems.

Therefore, for Japanese enterprises, employees are the most important value, and trust in people is far superior to trust in equipment, data and system. All automation or information construction is also aimed at helping people to work, so Japanese enterprises never talk about replacing people with machines or unmanned factories. If China wants to learn the craftsman spirit, it should best learn from the organizational culture and institutions that nurtured the craftsman in Japan. But in recent years, such a culture has faced a huge challenge: Japan's aging population and a large shortage of young people in the manufacturing industry have left no one to pass on the knowledge.

Japan is also aware of its lack of data and information systems and has begun to work on them. This can be clearly seen in the framework and objectives of Japan's "Industrial Value Chain Industry Alliance". Seven of the 19 work items proposed by the alliance are directly related to big data. It can be said that Japan's transformation strategy is a helpless move to deal with its population structure problems and social contradictions, the core of which is to solve the way of knowledge acquisition and inheritance of surrogate people.

However, Japan is also faced with many challenges in the process of transformation. Firstly, the lack of data accumulation makes the knowledge and experience transfer from people to information system and manufacturing system lack of basis and judgment criteria. The second is the conservative culture of Japanese industrial companies, resulting in a shortage of software and IT skills, as expressed in the "Manufacturing White Paper 2015" published by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry: "Japanese companies are now showing an emphasis on software, as opposed to the accelerating manufacturing transformation in Germany and the United States."

3 / Germany: "Inhibition of knowledge on equipment through continuous upgrading of equipment and production systems"

Germany is world-famous for its advanced equipment and automated production lines, so it can be said that it has the qualification to outperform others in the strength of equipment manufacturing industry. At the same time, the German rigorous style, as well as its unique "apprenticeship" higher education model, makes the German manufacturing style is very pragmatic, and the combination of theoretical research and industrial application is also the most close. However, Germany has also been facing a labor shortage for a long time, and in the 2015 National Competitiveness Index report, labor was the only area where Germany was lower than the average for innovation-driven countries. So Germany had to make up for this by developing more advanced equipment and highly integrated automated production lines.

The logic of German manufacturing is this:

Problems occur → people (or equipment) solve problems → knowledge and processes to solve problems are solidified into equipment and production lines → similar problems are automatically solved or avoided

To give an intuitive example of the difference between the Japanese and German approaches to solving problems, if material sorting errors occur frequently on the production line, the solution in Japan is most likely to be improved material identification (color, etc.), employee training, and a review system. Germany, on the other hand, is likely to design an automatic sorting system for radio frequency identification (RFID) scanning codes, or use an image recognition robot arm to do the sorting automatically.

For another example, Germany has long cured the error compensation, tool life prediction, multi-axis synchronization algorithm, spindle vibration frequency compensation and other solutions in the form of function package into the machine tool, so that even the workers who are not skilled in manufacturing technology and operation can produce reliable products. It is precisely for this reason that Germany has become the world's first equipment manufacturing country.

In addition to the pursuit of automatic solution of problems in the production site, we can also see the efforts to reduce human factors in the management and operation of enterprises. For example, the best ERP, MES, APS and other software suppliers are all from Germany. A large amount of information input, plan generation and traceability are completed automatically through software to minimize the uncertainty caused by human factors.

However, Germany also lacks the accumulation of data collection, because the German manufacturing system adopts a zero-tolerance attitude towards faults and defects, and problems can be solved once and for all through the transformation of the equipment end. Problems are not allowed in the German consciousness, so data will not naturally be generated by problems. The most direct manifestation is to search universities and enterprises in Germany, and almost no one is doing quality predictive analysis such as equipment pre-diagnosis and health management (PHM) and virtual measurement. In addition, due to the high degree of automation and integration of German production lines, the overall equipment efficiency (OEE) is very stable, and there is less room for optimization using data.

Germany gains huge economic returns from the export of equipment and industrial products. Because of the excellent quality and reliability of products, Made in Germany enjoys a very good brand reputation. But Germany has also discovered in recent years that most industrial products can only be sold once, so every customer is one less customer. Meanwhile, with the rise of equipment manufacturing and industrial capacity in some developing countries, Germany's market is also being squeezed. As a result, German industrial exports barely grew in the five years from 2008 to 2012. As a result, Germany has come to realise that it is better to sell kit than solutions, and even better to sell services as well.

Therefore, behind the Industry 4.0 plan proposed by Germany is the system products produced after the integration of the knowledge system accumulated in the manufacturing system. Meanwhile, the knowledge made in Germany is provided to customers in the form of software or toolkit as value-added services, so as to achieve sustainable profitability on customers. This from Germany's industrial design framework 4.0 can very clearly see, the whole framework of the core elements is "integration", including vertical integration and horizontal integration and the end-to-end integration and so on, it's too like the style of the German manufacturing system, is do well in Germany, also provides a way to provide value-added services. Therefore, the main purpose of Germany in the Fourth Industrial Revolution was to use knowledge to further enhance the competitiveness of its industrial products export and generate direct economic returns.

4 / US: "Gain new knowledge from data and migration, and excel at upending and redefining issues"

Compared with Japan and Germany, the United States pays the most attention to the role of data in solving problems, and relies heavily on data in customer demand analysis, customer relationship management, quality management in the production process, equipment health management, supply chain management, product service life management and service, etc. As a result, the United States and Japan have chosen two different ways to improve their manufacturing systems since the 1990s. American enterprises generally choose the 6-Sigma system which relies heavily on data, while Japanese enterprises choose the lean management system which relies heavily on people and institutions.

In the quality and management reform after 2000, most Chinese manufacturing enterprises chose the lean system. On the one hand, it is because of the similarity between Chinese and Japanese culture, and more importantly, it is because Chinese enterprises generally lack the basis of data accumulation and informatization. This problem has not been solved until now.

In addition to get the data from the production system, the United States is also put forward in the early 21st century "all the product lifecycle management (PLM)", the concept of the core is for all product related data in the whole life cycle management, management object is the product data, value-added services and implementation of the whole life cycle of purpose is to design the closed-loop data.

Data is also the most important way for the United States to acquire knowledge. It not only attaches importance to data accumulation, but more importantly, to data analysis, as well as to the management culture in which enterprise decisions are based on the facts reflected by data. The correlation between different factors, the causal relationship between things, the qualitative and quantitative description of a phenomenon and the occurrence process of a certain problem mined from data can all be described through the model established after analyzing the data, which is also the process of knowledge formation and inheritance.

In addition to using knowledge to solve problems, the United States is also very good at using knowledge to make disruptive innovations that redefine problems. For example, in the American aero-engine manufacturing industry, reducing engine fuel consumption is an important problem to be solved. Most enterprises will be optimized in design, material, process, control, etc to solve this problem, however, general electric (GE) found that the plane's fuel consumption and the pilot's driving habits and the maintenance of the engine is very relevant, I will jump out from the manufacturing end to ops side to solve this problem, receiving the effect is more obvious than from manufacturing side to improve. This is the basis and source of confidence for the "Power of 1%" proposed by GE in the promotion of the industrial Internet. In fact, it has nothing to do with manufacturing. Therefore, the key word in the intelligent manufacturing revolution of the United States is still "subversion", which can be clearly seen from its new strategic layout. It uses the industrial Internet to subvert the value system of the manufacturing industry, and uses digitalization, new materials and new production methods (3D printing, etc.) to subvert the production mode of the manufacturing industry.


The United States, Japan, Germany


What is the layout of the future reform

From the cultural differences among Japan, Germany and the United States, we analyze the differences in understanding, emphasis and purpose of the intelligent manufacturing revolution in the three countries. In addition, the differences in competitiveness of these countries are also the key factors that lead to the differences in their strategic directions, among which the differences in the distribution and future layout of the manufacturing value chain of each country play a decisive role.

The distribution of value elements in production activities from upstream to downstream is as follows: idea innovation and demand creation, raw materials and basic enabling technology, key equipment and core parts, production process and production system, products and services.

In the whole distribution of value factors, China has advantages in the production process and production system (mainly reflected in labor cost and production capacity), but is at a disadvantage in all other links.

Then, if we make a horizontal comparison, what is the position of the value element in the production activities of the major countries in the world and the layout of the future reform?

1 / US: "Stay firmly upstream of the factors of production and try to reach downstream"

The United States has obvious advantages in the distribution of factors of production activities, in ideas innovation and demand creation, in raw materials and enabling technologies, and in value-added services of products. The core competitiveness of the American industrial system mainly comes from the "6S ecosystem" :

(1) Aerospace: It has accumulated a lot of technology dividends for the American manufacturing industry and become the main source of basic enabling technologies in the American industrial system.

(2) Semiconductor: In recent years, we have invested a lot in the research and development of low-energy semiconductor materials, which has obvious advantages in the core of future intelligent technology and low-energy and high-performance chip technology.

(3) Shale gas: it has become the most important alternative energy in the United States, with the layout of new and clean energy fields in the future.

(4) Intelligent service to create economy: with the help of the advantages of the United States in the field of computer and information technology, the layout of the manufacturing service terminal with the highest profit will be carried out.

(5) The spirit of innovation represented by Silicon Valley: a blue ocean where users' potential needs are explored through continuous innovation and new markets and business opportunities are constantly obtained.

(6) Sustainable talent resources.

In terms of the strategic layout of the fourth industrial revolution, the White House put forward the "National Manufacturing Innovation Network Plan" in March 2012, establishing nine research and innovation centers in four major areas of manufacturing (as shown in the figure below).

Analysis of the United States' 6 s' ecological system and manufacturing development strategy layout, we is not hard to find, the United States tried to in a production system is the most basic material end (energy and materials), use of industrial product service side (Internet technology and ICT services), and driven by innovation business model, firmly grasp the industrial value chain of the most high value content of a few parts, In this way, no matter how advanced German manufacturing equipment is or how efficient China's manufacturing system is, the core advantage of its competitiveness can be ensured from the source and the delivery end of value.

2 / Japan: "Although losing a lot of market in the product sector, industrial competitiveness is shifting upwards"

In the past, the core competitiveness of Japanese manufacturing mainly lies in the production process and production system, products and service side. For the past two years, Japan's two strongest traditional industries, car manufacturing and consumer electronics, have been losing market share to South Korea, the United States and China, seemingly losing its edge on the product side. However, Japan is the world's most innovative country, with 40 companies listed in the 2015 Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship 100 list. Meanwhile, Japan rose to fourth place in the 2015 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index, up from 10th in the previous year. In fact, behind Japan's decline in consumer electronics is a shift in the direction of Japanese innovation. Japan has begun to have more say in upstream raw materials and enabling technologies, as well as in key equipment and components.

For example, after losing its advantages in the electrical industry, Panasonic found new development opportunities in the fields of automotive electronics, residential energy and business solutions, and also became the most advanced battery manufacturer in the world. Tesla electric vehicles use Panasonic 18650 battery. After losing its top spot in consumer electronics, Sony has made a breakthrough in the medical field and now accounts for more than 80% of the world's medical endoscopes. Sharp has also shifted its core businesses to smart healthcare, smart homes, food, water and air safety, and education. In the manufacturing white paper 2015, Japan prioritized the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics, while also stepping up investment in materials, medical care, energy and key components.

3 / Germany: "Make full use of technical advantages in key equipment and parts, production processes and production systems to enhance profitability and competitiveness through services"

Germany in core equipment and key parts and components, as well as the production process and production system two link has very obvious technical advantage, thanks to the hidden champions to small and medium-sized enterprises as the core enterprise, as well as Germany pragmatic apprenticeships dual education, both for the German industry provides a solid foundation, is made difficult to shake the foundations of Germany.

Germany's hidden champions are barely noticed by the outside world. They are all small but have huge market shares in their fields, ranking among the top three in the world. These small and medium-sized enterprises accounted for 70% of German exports, they return on sales are more than twice the normal companies in Germany, with a high level of research and development capabilities and technological innovation ability, pay attention to product value and customer's joint manufacturing capability, high quality high efficiency and lean, efficient operating system flexibility of globalization, a large part of them have been passing on for one hundred years.

High-quality technical workers and engineering and technical professionals have always been regarded as the support of German economic development and the quality guarantee of "Made in Germany" products. The vocational education aimed at cultivating professional and technical workers plays an important role in the social development of Germany, and has formed a relatively complete and constantly adjusted legal system, which guarantees the long-term and stable development of vocational education with dual system as the main feature. Apprentices not only learn practical skills from their masters in the workshop, but also learn necessary theoretical knowledge at school. In Germany, about 600, 000 young people, or about two-thirds of their age group, start dual vocational education each year.

Germany is an export-oriented country of industrial products. Due to its small domestic market and weak own demand, almost all of its industrial products are exported, thus achieving Germany's position as the largest exporter of manufacturing equipment. However, as the emerging economies represented by the BRIC countries have basically completed industrialization, the new round of growth engine in Southeast Asia and Africa has not been fully opened, leading to the stagnation of the demand for industrial equipment products in Germany. In recent years, the total value of Germany's industrial exports has hardly seen any growth, which has affected Germany's economic development to some extent. Thus it can be seen that the core purpose of Germany's Industry 4.0 is mainly in two aspects:

One is to increase the competitiveness of German manufacturing and open up new markets for German industrial equipment exports.


Second, to shift the focus from the product end to the service end, and to enhance the sustainable profitability of German industrial products, we should change the status of selling only equipment while the proportion of service income is small.



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